Many commenters have pulled what they think are the emblematic Sopranos quotes – for me it was always the title of this post, uttered by at least one character at every funeral (after the envelopes) and often after every tragedy.

Shrug.

There’s lots of interesting commentary out there about the show, including in our own comboxes here, and the reaction is just so interesting to me – if David Chase wanted his work to provoke a reaction and some intense conversation – he got what he wanted, and good for him. It’s inspiring – and not in an insipid way, but in a real, think-through-things way for any creative person who spends much of her waking hours (and probably many of the sleeping hours, too) surveying, scraping, digging and contemplating how to express what she sees in the world and whether or not it’s a worthy endeavor in the first place.

Ross Douthat, as he is wont to do, says it best, I think:

Complaining about the ambiguous, "life goes on, but you could be killed at any moment" conclusion, Matt notes that "at the end of Anna Karenina we find out what happens to Anna, and it’s not because Tolstoy sold out." But we do find out what happens to Tony: He leaves therapy, and with at any chance of getting out of the family business, and at the same time it becomes clear that none of his nearest and dearest will be getting out either. Carmela gave up on escape a season ago; A.J. is bought off by his parents and will doubtless end up a mobbed-up club owner soon enough; Meadow is headed for marriage to a mafioso’s son and a lucrative job as a lawyer defending, well, people like her dad. (Her conversation with Tony, where she justifies giving up medicine by describing how watching him hauled away in handcuffs taught her that “the state can crush the individual," is one of the best moments of the finale, not just because he gets off the incredulous line "Jersey?" in reply, but because for a moment you can see him wrestling with the urge to tell her that the Mob isn’t worth defending – wrestling and, as always, winning.) The Sopranos was a show about whether the Soprano family, both nuclear and extended, escapes damnation, and the ending answers the only question that matters: They don’t.

I should note that the theme of damnation doesn’t make The Sopranos a Christian show by any means; it’s too dark for that, too despairing in its treatment of its characters, both criminals and civilians. It’s not atheistic so much as anti-humanistic: God may exist, and indeed the show contains numerous incidents, from Tony and Christopher’s near-death experiences to Paulie’s Marian vision, that could reasonably be interpreted as encounters with the numinous. But if heaven is throwing ladders down, human beings are incapable of climbing them, and divine grace is nowhere to be found. This has made it increasingly unpleasant to watch, which in a way is a good thing; it shouldn’t be pleasant to watch people choose hell over and over again, and in these last twelve episodes, in particular, Chase did a good job of stripping away the element of voyeurism that often made the show morally problematic.